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  Chucky said to his conference system, “You still there?”

  Moke’s voice, a nasal twang partly hidden in there, said, “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “I think you better pay the man.”

  Chucky, circling his desk, ran stiff-curled fingers through his hair—the wiry blondish waves kinking back on his head—made a glide over to the tree and put on his orange hardhat, set it low over his eyes.

  “I’m going to pay him. That’s not the question I asked you, boy. Have I ever said I didn’t intend to pay?”

  The speaker system remained silent.

  An idea edged its way into Chucky’s brain. What if the boy kept his mouth shut because he felt alone, like some redneck manure-spreader among all the Latin dandies? What if the boy was simply self-conscious? It had occurred to Chucky there was another image that would fit him better. A bronc-stomper was what Moke should be playing, not some candy-ass rocker.

  But that analysis would have to wait.

  Chucky continued circling the desk. “To answer the question, no. I told Nestor that. I told you, you told him.” Keep the record straight. “He gets delivery tonight. Two-hundred thousand paid in full. In hundreds—Lionel says he got all used hundreds and a Samsonite bag tested by a four-hundred-pound gorilla, so we know it won’t come open, right? Blow away. But giving him a person along with it . . . that’s pretty weird shit we’re talking about there, you know it? I think it slips Nestor’s mind he’s living in Miami, Florida, now. You know what I mean? Mention to him if you would, we’re part-civilized here. Our gods don’t think much of human sacrifice.”

  “They don’t?” Moke’s voice said.

  The boy could be dry if you fed him lines. Chucky moved from his desk toward the balcony, then remembered something and changed his direction. At the door to the living room he removed his hardhat and pressed in close to the door panel to look through a peephole.

  The girl sat at the near end of the sofa, giving Chucky her left profile from about fifteen feet. More than pleasant looking though not sensational. She sat paging through his latest copy of Shotgun News with some degree of interest. Sandals, slim legs crossed, she’d go about a hundred and five. It looked like a beige sundress under the white cotton blazer, the sleeves pushed up a little on her arms. Nice tan. No jewelry except for the Cartier-style watch with the leather band. Blond-streaked hair to her shoulders, cut off he would say abruptly, a manageable style, simple—rather than all swirly curly the way Chucky liked a girl’s hair. She didn’t look anything like he’d been picturing her since talking to his friend Barry and arranging the date. No, she looked like somebody’s sister, like she’d smile a lot with healthy uncapped teeth, hands folded in her lap and say, “Gee, Mr. Gorman . . .” She also looked, from here, about eighteen years old. He’d see in a minute if she was any good.

  Chucky swapped the hardhat for the snappy yachting cap he tilted low over his eyes. Moving back to the desk he said, “Tell Nestor . . . tell him before he starts free-basing this evening, gets to trembling and becomes devilish . . . I expect a call.”

  The phone speaker remained silent.

  “Tell him we have customs, too,” Chucky said. “Gringo customs. We kill a chicken, we eat it, we don’t shake beads and sprinkle its blood around. He wants a life for a life, he has to ask for it himself. It has to come from on high, not told to me by some messenger boy.”

  Silence. Though Chucky knew this one wouldn’t last.

  Moke’s voice said, “I expect you realize how much you need him, you want a good source.”

  “Like I need a three-foot yang-yang,” Chucky said. “The man comes through, why not, all the dough he’s making. But I’ll tell you, the association is far from comfortable. Nestor, all he has to do is see The Godfather on TV, he goes freaky for a week. The point here is, he knows I wasn’t playing that tune. I didn’t set him up. I made an honest mistake . . .”

  “You made a dumb mistake.”

  “Which I’m paying for. But you tell him, hear? I’m sitting on the cashbox till he calls me.”

  Silence.

  “You got it? Grunt once for yes, two for no.”

  “You threaten him you know what he’ll do.”

  “Tell me,” Chucky said. “Keep talking while your mouth’s still open.”

  “He’ll cut off your product or your cojones, one.”

  Chucky said, “Do you know how many times in the past ten years I’ve been cut off, sold out, fucked over, picked up, jerked around one way or another and yet, look-it here, who’s still king of the shit pile?” Pink warning lights began popping before his eyes and he paused to let them settle, melt down, wanting to use only a portion of his energy. He said, “It’s dumb to get mad at the help for what the master’s doing. I got a young lady waiting out’n the living room wants to proposition me . . .”

  Moke’s voice said, “You calling that little piss squirt my master? Jeez-us Christ.”

  It stopped Chucky cold. He cocked his head, looking at the telephone machine on his desk.

  “There may be hope for you yet,” he said, beginning slowly. “I’ve seen white boys, fine young men, take on that greaseball strut, that curl to the lip, and land in a federal correction facility for showing off. Isn’t anything the DEA despises worse’n a white boy turned spic or hippie on ’em. You worked for me I’d dress you up, Mr. Moke.”

  “Thank the Lord Jesus I don’t,” Moke’s voice said, still not hiding that unruly twang.

  Push him some more. “You believe,” Chucky said, “I can’t change your life or even bring it to a close?”

  “I would like to see you step up and try,” Moke’s voice said, with enough pure bottomland in it to make Chucky break into a grin as he stepped over to the tree and exchanged the yachting cap for the big straw cowboy hat.

  He reached back in his mind and across the river then—take Crump Boulevard from the VA hospital—all the way over to West Memphis to get more of a shitkicker edge to his tone and said, “Tell me something, I’m curious. Where you from? I’m going to say . . . you ready? I’m going to say inside of fifty miles of some snake bend in the Red River. Am I right or wrong?”

  There was a long hesitation before Moke’s voice said, “How’d you pick that out?”

  “I’m right, huh? Where you from?”

  “Texarkana.”

  “You don’t mean to tell me. Come on,” Chucky said, “I was going to say Texarkana and I chickened out. I just had a strange feeling.”

  “You did?”

  “Listen, tell me something else. What’s a cowboy like you doing working for a pack of breeds?”

  “Making wages,” Moke’s voice said.

  Chucky waited a moment, holding himself still. “I bet you’ve never been turned loose, kicked outta the chute, so to speak. You know what I’m saying? Allowed to show what you can do.”

  “I bet I haven’t neither.”

  “You don’t take part in that weird santería shit, do you?”

  “They start painting chickens I go on over to Neon Leon’s have a cold beer.”

  Chucky waited again. It was hard.

  “Hey. I just had a thought. What would you say to coming by here for a few cold ones, tell some lies? Say tomorrow? I got a hunch about something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it over the phone. Let’s wait till tomorrow.”

  “I suppose I could stop by,” Moke’s natural voice said.

  “Fine,” Chucky said. “Yeah, hey. Tell that weird Cuban I need a word with him. You suppose you could do that for me?”

  “I’ll see what he says,” Moke’s voice said.

  “Shake her easy,” Chucky said.

  He sighed, worn out, switched off the system. Like trying to get a little girl back in olden times to take off her panties. It was hard labor, what you had to do to cover your ass and stay ahead. Work work work:

  Moke did strongarm chores for
the Cuban. Moke would be a dandy choice—dumb, eager and right there—to take the Cuban out should the need arise.

  3

  SHOTGUN NEWS, KYLE MCLAREN LEARNED, offered a lot more than shotguns. It was a tabloid-size catalogue of military weapons and gear: rifles, handguns, nasty-looking submachine guns, knives, machetes, steel whips . . . steel whips? . . . Dutch army helmets, mustard gas in a handy ten-ounce aerosol container . . .

  It occurred to her she might have to do a double check on Mr. Gorman, ask around, learn a little more about his lifestyle. Shotgun News did not go with the brocade draperies, the formal, traditional furniture, the huge Hudson Valley landscapes in the heavy gilt frames. Or did it? Maybe his mother had decorated the place. Maybe Chucky Gorman was hardline NRA, ready to defend his property against Communists, Cubans, Haitians or citizens of Miami in general; living thirty miles north might not be to him a safe enough distance.

  There was a phone with extension buttons—one of them lit—on the marble coffee table, no ashtray, no other magazines. Shotgun News was it.

  How about a nice MIA-E2 semiautomatic rifle with matching handguard, sling and bipod? Set it up on the table and get them coming over the rail of the fifteen-story balcony.

  It occurred to her, also, to move from the sofa. The sliding glass doors to the balcony were directly across the room, the draperies pulled back all the way, so that she faced sun-reflected sky flat on the glass, a west exposure. If Mr. Gorman sat across from her she wouldn’t be able to read his expression. But as Kyle waited and the sky paled, lost its fire, her mind changed with it.

  Why bother to move? To begin with, she was almost certain she was wasting her time, that she would not be able to relate to a grown man who went by the name “Chucky.” She could recall only one person in her whole life named Chucky and he was a little kid back in New York, a spoiled little pain in the ass, in fact; so there you were. The profile she had on this Chucky described a man:

  Thirty-two who looked at least forty. Originally from Georgia, a well-to-do family that milled cotton for generations, carried Chucky on a remittance for a time—he’d had some kind of mental problem—then cut him off, disowned him. It didn’t matter though, because Chucky did all right on his own: invested, bought real estate, belonged to a good club . . . But what did he do exactly?

  Her friend Barry Stam, who was also a client and had indirectly arranged this meeting, said, “Ask him. See what he says.” Barry, with his put-on innocence, eyebrows raised. “I’ll be interested to hear your impression, what you think of him.”

  “Does he have money? I mean a lot.”

  “Wait and see,” Barry said, deadpan. “He’s an unusual type. Colorful, you might say.”

  She waited, all right . . .

  Almost a half hour before a door finally opened and there he was.

  As for Kyle’s instant impression—as Chucky came in with his shirt hanging out, wearing untied sneakers, baggy pants and a straw cowboy hat, grinning—she had to believe this Chucky wasn’t much older or much different than the other Chucky she had once known on East Thirty-first Street in New York. This one was a great deal larger and in his heart, beneath all that bulk, he could be a Shotgun News freak, a hardline conservative, an eccentric with Old South connections, but he sure wasn’t anyone’s image of a serious businessman.

  Look at that sweet young thing.

  Chucky believed he loved girls who were sweet and wholesome, without guile or wile, because he didn’t know any. But here was one right in his own living room. He felt alive.

  Then felt the cowboy hat perched on his thick crown and raised his eyes to make sure that’s what it was. He said to the sweet girl, “Whoops, you caught me playing.” He pulled off the hat as he walked back to the den, sailed it inside and slammed the door closed.

  “Now then . . . So you’re Kyle McLaren.” Sounding like he couldn’t believe it. Which was true, though he gave the words more amazement than he actually felt. “I enjoyed the newsletters you sent. You write all that stuff in there?”

  She said, “Yes, it’s part of the service.” But seemed just a bit vague. Now getting her neat mind in order.

  “And you come all the way down from Palm Beach to see me? I appreciate it.”

  She said, “Well, I get around—”

  “Hey, I bet you do.”

  “I travel quite a lot,” Kyle said. “So I don’t consider the drive from Palm Beach a major effort.”

  That sounded pretty neat and orderly. Chucky slipped over next to the coffee table to look down at her, get a closer view. Delicate girl features—a touch of blush, lip gloss maybe, just a speck—but with a backpacking outdoor look about her. Her right hand rested on a straw handbag next to her.

  “You don’t have a little mini tape recorder in there, do you?”

  He heard her say, “No, I don’t. Why, do they inhibit you?” as he turned and walked a few steps toward the balcony. Stopped and turned back to her with his grin in place.

  “I know people these days’d have you patted down before they’d say a word. Which doesn’t sound like too bad an idea.” He paused, catching her solemn expression, and said, “I hope you know when I’m kidding.”

  Kyle said, “Why don’t you give me a call sometime when you’re not”—picking up her handbag—”and I happen to be down this way.”

  Chucky said, “Hey, come on, I’m serious now. Look-it how serious I am.”

  But she glanced toward the door and so did Chucky at the sound of three light raps. Chucky said, “Yeah? Who goes?” and one of the double doors opened.

  Lionel Oliva, in a pale-blue double-breasted suit and silky gray sportshirt, stepped in from the hall. He said to Chucky, “Rainy is here. What should I do with him?”

  “Jesus, Rainy,” Chucky said, “that’s right. Put him in the den.”

  “There somebody with him. Rainy say is a friend of his.”

  Chucky squinted. “You got one of my shirts on.”

  “You gave it to me,” Lionel said.

  “Yeah, I guess it’s all right,” Chucky said. “Rainy’s insecure.” He started to turn away and stopped. “Lionel? You ever see the guy before?”

  “No, it’s somebody he met, you know, where he was up there.”

  “Yeah, I guess it’s okay,” Chucky said. The door closed as he turned back to Miss Kyle McLaren . . .

  All eyes. Look at her looking at him, the little broad from Palm Beach in her pure and spotless sundress, clean undies and a light cotton blazer, perfect for business or casual wear, for that cocktail at the Everglades Club with an important client or maybe even Mr. Right . . . He could see a shot of her and this clean-cut bozo in Town & Country.

  “What can I get you?”

  “Nothing, thanks.”

  “You don’t drink?”

  She said, “I don’t care for anything.” Sitting on the edge of the sofa. “Why don’t we try to do this another time?”

  “No, look, you’re here,” Chucky said. “Let me ask you one question, we can play it from there. Okay?”

  She nodded. “All right.”

  “What do you think of gold?”

  “Right now? I like Swiss franc futures better.”

  “Come on, how do you see it as an investment? What I want to know is, you going to give me a straight answer or a lot of words?”

  “Well, first of all”—she sounded vague again—”you don’t invest in gold, you speculate. The British fleet moved on the Falklands last spring and the price rose twenty-three points the first two days . . .”

  “There. That’s what I mean by words,” Chucky said, moving in on the coffee table again. “Now you’re going to tell me about uncertainties in the world market, devaluation of the pound, all those Wall Street words. Right?”

  “And as the fleet sailed,” Kyle said, settling back into the sofa but not taking her eyes from his, “Evita was still playing in the West End. If you find that interesting maybe you’d like to back a Broadway play. It offers about t
he same risk as grain futures, but it’s way more fun. Or, if you like movies, I can show you a film offering that doesn’t look too bad.”

  Chucky’s grin this time was honest, sincere. “Very clever. Movies, I never thought of movies. You know what the last one I saw was?”

  “Gone with the Wind,” Kyle said. “Do you do much trading?”

  “In what?”

  “I mean are you active in the market.”

  “Well, you know, now and then. But hey, listen. If I invested in a movie, would I get to meet any starlets?”

  The girl just stared at him.

  “I’m serious,” Chucky said. “Something like that, that sounds interesting. But let me tell you where I’m at, okay? The particular problem I run into . . . No, first you tell me a few things. See if you’re the type of expert I need.”

  She said, “What do you want to know, my background, business experience?”

  “Yeah, where you been, how old you are . . .”

  “I’m thirty-one,” Kyle said. “I started out as an analyst at Merrill Lynch, moved to Hutton to handle accounts . . . came down here and opened my own office two and a half years ago . . .”

  “You married?”

  “No.”

  “You fool around?”

  “Mr. Gorman, I have to tell you something.”

  “Please, Chucky. Everybody calls me Chucky, even the help.”

  She said, “Chucky,” carefully, as though she was trying it out. “All right . . . Chucky.” She bent her head down and up, brushed short bangs across her forehead. “I’m getting a kink in my neck, looking up at you.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry.” He took several steps back. “How’s this?”

  “Why don’t you sit down?”

  It was as though the idea hadn’t occurred to him. He said, “Yeah, I could do that, I guess.” And came around the coffee table to sit sideways on the sofa, arm extended, his hand resting against the high rounded back.